It now needs to be online, available at any time, and it needs to be fast. Messengers are proving valuable channels to support customers in a way that is natural to them. The approach can enable customer service teams to deliver fast, friendly and personal support. But to cater for a higher volume of support requests, many businesses are turning to chatbots and automation technology. Well-designed chatbots are the key to scaling conversational support, but there's a lot of debate around what makes a good chatbot.

Chatbot technology is at an inflection point. The promises made about the potential for the technology have yet to come true. The market is predicted to grow 25% year-on-year to reach $1.25 Billion by 2025. Yet current attempts to build chatbots are failing. It is not clear how this apparent contradiction will resolve. Will chatbot technology develop to a point where it's easy to make chatbots that appear intelligent?

These "good old-fashioned AI" systems were amazing in many ways, but they were also flawed. They required a lot of effort and engineering to get right. It was not a case of sticking a bunch of training data into a machine learning algorithm and turning the crank -- the natural language grammar that interprets user queries was carefully built by hand. Statistical techniques were not widely used, which meant that systems were inherently brittle. Queries had to have exactly the right form, or the chatbot would not understand.

Chatbots have the potential to be amazing. The Star Trek computer seemed like it was finally becoming a reality. So far, we've been let down. Most chatbots are rubbish and it's the tools that are to blame. If I want to build a chatbot with some semblance of intelligence I have to design for a myriad of possibilities. Surely this is what AI should be doing for me?

Chatbots are artificially intelligent platforms that interact and communicate with customers on behalf of a business entity. They are making a difference, developing a different user experience and raising customer retention and loyalty. With the latter being vital to the running of any business, it has also become vital to have chatbots personalize their services for customers. Personalization is the best way for bots to help customer loyalty grow. It is also a feature that is quite difficult to achieve.

Earlier this month, Kik CEO Ted Livingston said payments are all that's needed for chatbots to live up to last year's hype. He says the technology is in "a holding pattern until we get mobile payments," but insists he's seen enough "magic" to know it's only a matter of time until bots become the next big commerce platform. Livingston's comments make a lot of sense, too. Not having payment on an eCommerce platform is a bit of a problem, for obvious reasons, but is this really all that's standing in the way of chatbots changing the way people shop online? All you have to do is look at China, where WeChat accounts for 35% of all time spent on mobile, to see what bots can do for commerce.

Wondering when your order from GameStop will be delivered? Simply open Facebook Messenger and ask. Looking for tips on how to pair that new jacket you're eagerly awaiting with jewellery? This is the new retail reality thanks to the emergence of chatbots. Consumers appreciate the level of personalization and convenience that chatbots deliver effortlessly -- and through the channels where they already spend time.

Maluuba launched its first Siri-like personal assistant at TC Disrupt San Francisco four years ago. Since then, the company has raised 11 million and has licensed its technology to a number of handset manufacturers that now use it to power their own personal-assistant features. As Maluuba's head of product Mo Musbah told me, the company spent the last two years doubling down on how it could utilize deep learning in the context of natural language processing. To do so, it recently opened an R&D office in Montreal, for example. As Musbah told me, "our vision there is to build one of the largest deep learning labs in the world," so the company is definitely not lacking in ambition.

Every day now there's a new announcement of a major media or technology player betting big on the future of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, that will do everything from helping us book trips to controlling our ever-smarter homes. Our natural language is, well, the most natural way for humans to communicate. Getting what we want through a conversation with an intelligent agent is bound to feel simpler than using a click-based interface, especially in a world where mobile rules. It feels like a new horizon is opening up, but also like a bit of déjà vu. In the early 2000s I worked as a copywriter on one of the first IM-based chatbots, named VaVaVirgil, who was built to help the Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation educate teens on the dangers of smoking.